While taking Microbiology in college, we made throat cultures of
everybodies throat.  Actually each student cultured their own throat.
Since it was winter there were many with sniffles, coughs and runny
noses that are common at that time of year.  We then isolated as many
different looking colonies as we could from all of the cultures on the
initial plates.  Once the second series of plates were incubated we had
about 20 different looking pure cultures.  We then used reagent loaded
agar test tubes that had different reagents in about 13 regions.  We
inoculated the tubes with the pure cultures and then incubated those.
After incubation, the cultures would turn the different reagents
different colors or not.  We could then match the colors to a known key
and ID each culture.  We had quite a few different types of bacteria.  I
can't remember them all but Staph a. and Strep of different genui were
among them.  We then used the disks mentioned in the original question
and studied the zone of inhibition around each disk, containing many
different compounds.  One thing I will always remember is that Vitamin C
(natural or synthetic ascorbic acid) both had huge zones of inhibition
around them. As large as the zone around penicillin on many but not all
of the cultures.   Many others had none or at least much less.  This was
21 years ago, so echinacia was not even cosidered. :-)  Regardless, this
protocol may give you some ideas on how to proceed.  Sounds like fun.

TTFN,

Jeff Holbrook
Corning, NY

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